Vim in the Browser

Let’s talk about Vim for a minute.

Or rather, I will write, and you can read about Vim for three to seven minutes, depending on how fast on average you read.

I think text editors (and by extension, IDEs) are sort of like pizza or ramen noodles. There are near infinite varieties, you can get pretty much anything you want, but you tend to stick to the style you grew up with.

I quite enjoy Yokohama iekei-style ramen, though I have no real connection to the region, because during the pandemic I went four times a week to the local ramenya, which happened to serve iekei-style ramen. Yaguchi-san, if you are by some miracle reading this, please know that your ramen got me through some of the toughest times of this decade. ありがとうございます〜

In the same vein I tend to gravitate back twoards Vim every few months. I’ve gotten used to the creature comforts that the modern IDEs offer, with fast and accurate autocomplete (h/t Supermaven), but every so often I miss the simplicity of Vim.

So I was pretty happy when I discovered that you could use Vim style commands and keybindings in the browser.

The tool in question is Vimium, which is a browser extension that allows you to use Vim style commands and keybindings in the browser. It’s trivial to install, available for the major browsers minus Safari, and (and flavours of Chrome, Firefox). It’s not Vim in the traditional sense but the experience is a pretty good one.

I have no doubt that this will make my workflow faster, and it will seem more efficient, but at the same time I wonder if using tools such as these in the long term are beneficial.

Some time ago, on the recommendation of a friend who was obsessed with productivity, I tuned all the video content that I consumed up to 2x speed. I reasoned that this would allow me to get through content faster, and thus I would have ample extra time to devote to other activities.

However, the truth of the matter was that I did in fact get through more content, but I did not spend any less time doing so. Switching to 2x speed simply allowed me to get through more content faster. I did not save any time, I spent roughly the samea amount of time consuming 2x the content.

This also had the unintended consequence of making everything that I could not set to 2x speed seem slow. I haven’t gone out to the movies as often as before, because the movies play at a normal speed. Television shows on the actual television seem tragically drawn out. The same goes for podcasts, and other audio content.

I wonder if the same will happen with Vimium. I will be able to use the browser faster, open, read, close, tab, search, navigate, etc. faster. Will I eventually get bored of other media because they don’t have the same controls?

I wonder if this is a good thing.